You take the good with the bad.
Most notably, it’s been cold. Even for the Alaska interior, the birthplace of cold, it’s been cold. It’s was minus 30 to minus 45 degrees for a week until yesterday, when it warmed up to zero for a while. It was -72 in Chicken. Really, there’s a place called Chicken. With the cold weather, a certain grim determination kicks in for most of us, and we know that if we’re lucky – and a little careful – it will pass soon enough without incident. But certain procedures have to be followed.
Recess is canceled at minus 20. For the elementary teacher, that means kids are in the classroom all day. They can go to the gym, but they don’t all want to. Some of them sit in the classroom and play games. They get kind of wound up doing this day after day, and we all get a little bit edgy.
At home, a moose started hanging around the yard. My wife named her Zeus. Zeus the moose. She was bedded down near a big spruce tree on the driveway Monday afternoon, and she popped out from behind the tree right in front of my truck as I drove up. She was big. My truck is pretty big, but I remember looking UP at her flying by my front bumper. Moose don’t really care who they bother, and they can hurt you if they get it into their heads that you are the one bothering them. So you can’t really run them off. They go away when they want to, and in the meantime, we pick the kids up at school because we don’t want them meeting Zeus on their walk home from the bus stop.
Remember, it’s been cold, and the machines are under stress, too. We all have block heaters for the engines so we can start them after they’ve been parked overnight or all day at work. Even still, my truck had a case of the flashing check engine light the other morning. This place is a cold weather test lab. So we’re down to one vehicle now while the truck is in the shop along with everyone else’s. No big deal, we can make adjustments to our schedules, but we also use the truck to haul our water. Yeah. We carry a 300 gallon tank in the back and fill it at a bulk water place that sells water for about a cent and a half per gallon. This is kind of hard to explain, but for now I’ll just say that I figure we can go for about 12 more days with what we’ve got left in the storage tank. We’ve instituted a water conservation policy on long showers.
Then, yesterday, I got a call from a new internet service provider with a wireless broadband signal that comes in strong for us. We put our names on a list a few weeks ago, and today I went to town and picked up a little gadget that now brings us all the internet goodness we might want.
It’s weird. The cold weather keeps us inside days on end, a moose that we have to watch out for lurks outside in the yard, our water hauling truck breaks down, and a new blazing fast broadband signal starts bringing us more information than we need. And it all happened at the same time. The world we have to walk around in is messed up, but the internet blazes on. We call this progress.
11 Comments
Ah, I remember weather like that from when I lived in Northern Alberta. Now I live in New Brunswick where it never gets so cold, but it snows a lot more. Not sure which I prefer.
Never had a personal moose, though.
I’m in the midst of a reality check here. In central Ohio, we have recess when the windchill goes below 20. +20.
Maybe the number of days of indoor recess averages out, though. We’re probably just as jumpy, too, after days in a row in the same room together all day long.
No moose here. You’ve got us beat with that!
If we cut recess at plus 20 degrees, nobody would go outside from November to April. And we never talk about windchill temperature. Fortunately, it isn’t too windy here.
The kids hate it when it’s minus 19. But then I teach them about the meaning of the word, “marginal.”
We also cancel recess if there are moose on the playground. Some stuff, we don’t mess with.
After 18 months in the Sahara desert, I told my wife that she owes me a stint on Baffin Island. We got as far as Southern Ontario. She read your post… and she sticks by her position that anywhere that allows for -72 is not a place for her. Still, whether far too hot or far too cold, there is something to be said for a high speed internet connection.
I’ve never been in -72 weather, but we’ve been down to minus 50 or so. And hey, today it’s minus 12F, and it feels balmy. For real.
This is like reading about something out of a movie for me … so surreal … New Zealand here – hot, drought conditions, no moose either. I read this to my class of 10 and 11 year olds and they said ‘Are you for real?’ so cold you can’t go outside – TERRIBLE – you are allowed to get a bit edgy!!
Sending you lots of sunshine thoughts.
I love this post Doug – I’m actually going to share it with my class of 14 year olds next week as we are studying the Tundra and Permafrost at the moment.
Ironically yesterday I was mountain biking in the Ben Nevis Range in Scotland in just a t-shirt! Its been a warm could of days on this side of the Atlantic!
Keep smiling.
Ollie
Most days on our way to town in the morning, we pass someone riding a bicycle. I think it may be a woman because the rider is not very big, but it’s hard to tell with all the warm gear she wears. It’s dark, too, and she has reflectors and blinky lights all over the back of her clothes and bike. I was amazed to see her out there the other morning at -40, and still a couple of miles from town. Some of us do outside things in the cold weather, but we dress for it. Even still, this was remarkable to me.
Good to hear from you all. And it’s even warmed up a bit!
I remember being in Tok when it got to -66 during the cold snap of 1987 I think? It’s all the same– pretty bad– after about -45
And the moose thing– I’ve had them trap me by refusing to get out from in front of my door, interrupt soccer games by running onto the field, and generally lumber around the yard eating the old halloween pumpkins and what’s left of the nearby gardens…
But I did my time in a little water-free cabin, biking all winter. I miss some things about it, but not too many!
“Pretty bad- after about -45.”
That’s funny, but I know what you mean. Stuff goes wrong in a hurry then.
And the biking all winter….Man, that is serious.
I was walking to school in -25 degree weather outside Detroit when I was in 8th grade. Had my bare hands in my coat pockets when I slipped a bit and grabbed a metal sign post with my relatively warm hand. You know what happened … hand stuck to post. Fortunately friends helped breathe on my hand and I got it off with only a minor burn on my palm.
I’ve seen moose, but only in summer. My daughter’s school here in Reno would occasionally start recess late because they were out shooing the wild horses of the field before the kids came out. Wild horses are not always real amenable to being herded off green grass … they’re funny that way.
Brian
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[...] Great Outdoors, con’t I’m back. And, given that Mr. W. directed me to a post by Doug Noon describing -72 temperatures in Chicken, Alaska, I am going to shut my yap about the temperature [...]
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